


Paris (Gay Paris)

by FLWhite



Series: Chamonix [5]
Category: SKAM (France)
Genre: Angry Birds (literal), Angry girlfriends (also literal), Fluff, Lucille POV, Mention of Mental Illness, Mt. Mushmore, Multi, Slapstick, Texting, Weddings, choo choo all aboard for fluffville, mush, past Eliott/Lucille, past Lucas/Chloé, past Sofiott
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-07
Packaged: 2020-04-07 06:58:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19079863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FLWhite/pseuds/FLWhite
Summary: Some months after the events of “Lyon,” Basile and Daphné hold their wedding in Paris.Encounters both expected and surprising occur. There’s a lot of drinking and a lot of silliness and a lot of making out in the shrubbery and just a little wistfulness.I've always wanted to explore Lucille's perspective. So here we are.A sequel to@hallo-catfish's"Le toi du moi (Lyon),"in turn a sequel to their marvelous"Chamonix."Best to read those stories first/alongside, or the following may not make sense.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> 2.5 months and over 100k words later, I am well and truly spent. It's been a great ride, SKAMFr, and all y'all who've read some of that 100k.
> 
> (If they renew this show, I really may have to quit my day job.)

**Today, 10:22**

**You**

Oh yeah?

I’m also going to be in Paris next weekend.

Hm, can’t meet up though.

Going to be with _ma meuf_.

 

**Eliott**

hehe ooo ooo

well same, I’m going with Lucas

text if you two end up having some time free

dying to meet the mystery paramour

 

**Today, 10:25**

**You**

Are you meeting the parents then?

 

**Eliott**

fuck don’t remind me

just his mother for lunch

but I’m basically flipping out

 

**You**

Maybe wear that button-up to meet her.

And some pants that actually cover your ankles, just a thought.

 

**Eliott**

button-up but only because I have to bring one anyway

but ankles! never

 

**Today, 10:29**

**You**

Oh, you big baby.

OK, I’ve got to go.

Good luck.

 

**Eliott**

thanks

gonna need it

* * *

 

“Sorry, _ma petite_. Had to hurry on board.” She gives her weekend bag a firm shove so that it is more securely wedged between the two hard-sided rolling suitcases on the luggage rack, then drops with a sigh into her row, nodding politely at the elderly couple already ensconced in the window and middle seats.

“Oh please. I thought both of them looked great on you. I’d do the silver hoop earrings with the wine-colored one, that or the gold necklace. Oh, damn.” She puts her neatly manicured fingertips to her temple as the train begins, almost noiselessly, to accelerate. “Damn it! I left the crystal earrings on my dresser. Now I’ll need to borrow some from you. Yes, I’m sure, I can see them in my mind’s eye, sitting there. I took them off the stand but never put them in my bag. Thank—hey, _hey._ ” With another nod at the couple, who are eyeing her with some curiosity, she stands and turns, entering the vestibule between compartments, a little pink in the cheeks. If they’d followed her, they would hear her murmur, just loud enough to carry over the low magnetic purr of the train, “Well, what do _you_ think is a fair price? Ah? Mm-hmm?”

A man enters the vestibule, looking harried. He speaks in a soothing monotone to two toddlers he carries, turtle-like, in backpacks mounted to his chest and back. “Look, Émilie, look, Antoine. Look how fast we go. See how the trees begin to turn yellow.”

Emilie peers with rounded eyes around the vestibule. “Papa, Papa.” She points a plump finger. Her brother, catching sight of her, follows suit.

“No pointing, Emilou. Anton.” The man smiles in weary apology, as if to say _you, a woman near thirty, you must surely know how kids can be._

She smiles back, thinking, _no,_ monsieur _, and I don’t plan ever to find out_. “I’ll talk to you later, _Blanche Neige_. No, I said not to come meet me! Don’t be silly, princess.” She nods at the man, who looks a little sheepish, as well as his pointing children, as the automatic doors leading back to the full car of somnolent people part before her.

* * *

 

They make it to the park where the ceremony is to be held only just in time; already, the elderly relatives of the bride and groom are settling themselves into the white-painted folding chairs in the first row. She casts about for a pair of empty seats, then jolts, recognizing a headful of tawny hair that is standing on end like a miter in the second row from the front; by luck there are two unoccupied places beside it. “Come, _ma petite,_ ” she whispers, and they scuttle hand-in-hand up the aisle, their heels wobbling on the soft turf.

“Lucy!” Eliott drops the hand that is fiddling with his collar when she taps his shoulder. “What—?” He blinks at them both. He does not look particularly pleased. “But this is—”

“I should introduce you,” she begins, but then there is a slightly off-key chord, struck by the groom himself under the lakeside gazebo they are all facing, sweating in his white tuxedo and ruffle-fronted silk shirt in a searing shade of teal. He is armed with a guitar and a late-model hover mic that he clearly has not yet learned quite how to use. The officiant, a steel-haired woman of around sixty, looks on with a smile of professional patience.

“Shh,” says a woman all in pink, turning. She looks exactly like a middle-aged version of the groom. “Basile has worked very hard on this.”

“Sorry,” replies Lucille, with her most courtroom smile.

“Oh yeah, t’es une et je suis un et un plus un fait deux,” Basile begins, strumming. He looks like he is about to break into sobs; he does, in fact, give a huge sniffle when he hits “Tu seras ma Tour d’Eiffel,” and has to sing the line again. The crowd titters gently.

“He wrote it all by himself,” the woman in pink turns again as Basile strikes his final chord with a “Daphné!” that causes his voice to crack and his tears to pour finally forth; she sniffles a little herself while ignoring the pleading look that the tall, shiny-pated man to her left—who must also be consanguineous with Basile, given the curliness of what little gray-streaked dark hair still clings to his temples—gives her. “Isn’t he an amazing boy? So sensitive. So artistic.”

The three young people nod together.

The woman seems mollified; she nods back at them. “And you are? I don’t think I know any of you.”

“Er,” Lucille begins. “Well, I’m here just as a plus-one—”

“Ah, wait,” the woman is saying to Eliott. “Oh! I surely heard about you, my handsome boy, from Basile and Daphy! You are the _gay_ friend’s friend? Well, his boyfriend? Yes?” Her eyes sparkle. “Emile, was it?”

“Eliott, I’m Eliott.”

“And this is _my girlfriend_ Lucille, and I, I am Daphné’s university classmate, Chloé, Chloé Jeanson,” says Chloé, jabbing her hand at Madame Savary and accompanying it with her biggest, falsest smile.

“Lucille Daillencourt,” Lucille adds. Chloe’s hand is sweating a little in hers.

“Oh, how nice,” says Madame Savary. “How very nice. I knew an André Daillencourt in _lycée_ , looked just like Tom Cruise—”

“Monique, Monique,” the man beside her whispers loudly. “The bride will be here any moment.”

“All right, all right.” Monique winks at all three of them, chuckling, before turning to primly face the gazebo again. “Enchanted, dear children.”

As soon as she has looked away, Eliott and Chloé begin to sputter at each other across Lucille’s lap. “You—” they begin, then turn in tandem toward Lucille, wearing the same face of betrayal mingled with incredulity.

“You _know_ him?” Chloé hisses. The hand that does not clutch at Lucille’s is tight-fisted around the strap of her bag. “Did he just call you _Lucy_?”

“You know _her_?” Eliott runs both hands through his hair, which now takes on the aspect of an undercooked souffle as it slowly falls into place above his staring eyes. “Shit. _Shit_ . You’re dating _her_?” There’s something strangely furtive in the set of his mouth.

“And you two? You two know each other?” The gold hoop earrings that she borrowed from Chloé tap Lucille’s cheeks as she shakes her head. “ _How_?”

Nightmarish visions flash. What if Eliott were the stupid boy who’d led Chloé on for a whole year, the stupid boy Chloé has never seemed quite able to stop talking about? She sees the two of them, holding hands on the Pont de l’Université, kissing over lemonades at Luna Park, nestled in bed as a rainstorm pelts the eaves. She feels suddenly nauseous. But surely Eliott would’ve told her—she scours her memory—

They are interrupted by a series of strange high-pitched _weep weep weep_ s and clucks and rather angry-sounding honks coming from behind and approaching fast. A man chuckles somewhere to Lucille’s left. “More live music, hein? A little more contemporary this time?”

Then, trotting past them up the aisle while holding shut the beak of a beautiful, enormous, utterly enraged swan with both hands, his hair and extremely teal shirt flapping, comes Lucas Lallemant. He is closely accompanied by a young black man who would look much more dapper in his equally bright shirt had he not had a generous streak of birdshit down one sleeve and grass stains on both knees of his white trousers.

Eliott’s head perks like a puppy’s as Lucas passes; he emits a noise not dissimilar from the _weep weep_ s. Chloé glowers (at Lucas, at Eliott, at the assembled audience, at the trees), then turns to look at Lucille like she has just learned that the world is in fact made of cardboard and everyone has been lying to her all her life.

“ _Ma petite_ ,” Lucille murmurs, feeling the sweat beginning to bead at her temples and fervently wishing she’d brought a cooler dress. Chloé does not even bother to glare at her.

And there, Lucille groans to herself, there goes our very first damn wedding together. Lucas Lallemant ruining her love life, again. For she has no doubt that whatever happened, with Chloé and Eliott and Lucas, is all that tuft-head little bumbler’s fault.

Briefly, she allows herself the uncharitable observation that Lucas—whom she has to grudgingly admit sometimes has a certain saucer-eyed charm—looks like a small and sweaty piece of candy, the type offered at cheap restaurants after the meal, in his ridiculous shirt. But she shakes her head to clear it of such puerile sulking. Once the ceremony’s finished, they can walk a little along the lakeside, and she’ll speak to Chloé, put an arm around her. Chloé, sweet Chloé pretty as summer in her wine-colored dress, will listen, and a slow little smile will bow her petal-colored lips upward again.

Her professors had always told her that her patience was her greatest quality; her favorite of them, after congratulating her on passing the CAPA, had insisted that she take the ENM’s _premier concours_ and become a prosecutor. “Your patience, Mademoiselle Daillencourt, is like that of a woman twice your age. Your patience will win you every case.” He’d pushed his glasses up a fraction on his nose, smiling. “You must have children?”

Well, he’d _been_ her favorite professor.

But in any case, patience; patience, for which she has to thank not babies but the full-grown man to her right who actually is at that moment grinning, in her opinion, like a baby, and a rather dull-witted one at that. His gaze never swerves as Lucas, Lucas's fellow swan wrangler, and the bright white bird they cradle together stumble to a halt behind a goggling Basile.

A bespectacled blond with one densely feathered chicken wedged under each arm is next in the improbable procession, and a tall man whose dark ponytail swings with each jogging step, a beautifully crested mandarin duck relentlessly _weep-weep_ ing held before him with both hands like a priceless chalice, is the last to join the unruly line under the gazebo, centered on Basile. A general burble of amusement and mild consternation seizes the onlookers. Eliott giggles.

Chloé’s frown is as impassive as the hard blue of the sky.

M. and Mme. Savary rise from their seats; Lucille watches them gesture at Basile and the officiant, who both shrug helplessly back. She is sitting close enough to catch something about “this was all they had today.”

The blond man with the chickens puts one of them down carefully on the grass in order to beckon at the hover mic, which obediently drifts over to him. He taps it a few times, then nudges it to float near the officiant’s shoulder. Then he calmly reaches to take the guitar from Basile, who is mopping at both sweaty forehead and damp eyes with his pink pocket square.

Meanwhile, Lucas begins to smile back at Eliott. Then his eyes flicker past Chloé and Lucille, widening, and he turns decisively away to busy himself with his disgruntled avian charge, his face going a shade paler.

“Many waters cannot quench love,” murmurs the officiant, smiling less stiffly now. “And nor can exotic fowl. Please, all rise for the bride.” A supernova of pink rustles toward the assembly: as it draws closer, it resolves into Daphné, her hair piled atop her head, looking like a nonpareil in white with an undergown the exact shade of bubblegum. Four young women in wide-skirted pink dresses surround her. They deposit her next to Basile with slightly tearful embraces and take their places among the teal-shirted young men, casting quizzical glances at the state of the latter’s besmirched clothes and rather more concerned glances at their closely held birds.

Punctuated by muffled honks and suppressed giggles from Lucas and the man keeping the swan in check, Basile and Daphné read each other their vows, tearfully. M. Savary sobs while Mme. Savary pats his hand. The blond who’d helped Basile remove the guitar puts down his other chicken to take off his glasses and wipe his eyes.

Chloé, having long since withdrawn her hand from Lucille’s, now alternates between glaring at her, at Eliott, and at Lucas, who studiously avoids looking at any of them and almost loses his grip on the swan when he sniffs into his elbow.  

At last the vows are concluded and the newlyweds pass them, beaming amongst cheers and applause and chains of tiny bubbles shot from pink toy guns that the bridal party had concealed under their skirts. M. and Mme. Savary, radiant through their tears, file out, arm-in-arm; Black Ponytail sets down the mandarin duck, which joins the chickens on the turf under the gazebo, pecking peacefully at the grass.

Lucas and the swan’s other handler begin to deliver their petulant charge to liberty, as well, but as soon as its beak is freed and its webbed feet touch the earth, it honks fiercely, flapping its wide white wings, and strikes. Lucas jumps backward, but too late; his cries join the swan’s as its beak catches his elbow and thigh. The others crowd to his defense and pull him to safety behind the gazebo, using their arms to shield their faces from the swan, still beating its wings.

There is a crash almost directly in Lucille’s ears, and she throws her arms around Chloé, who yelps; Eliott has half-vaulted, half-stumbled over the first row of now-empty chairs separating him from Lucas and the other groomsmen. He darts toward them. His face is as grim as it had been silly. Lucille winces.

From within the huddle, Lucas at first sounds like he is crying. He gets to his feet unsteadily, clutching Eliott’s outstretched arms. Then he cackles, the words unmistakable, “I _told_ you we should’ve rented bats instead.”

The fluff does not merely adorn the exterior of that idiotic head, she realizes. It fills also the insides.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “—did you two seriously go fuck in the bushes, seriously?” Chloé cuts in.
> 
> Eliott blinks down at her. “We didn’t get that far."

“But that means he would’ve been fif—no, fourteen! Fourteen? Damn!” Chloé kicks at a tussock of abused-looking grass, ignoring the bits of dirt that spray across her bare toes. They are almost totally alone; the groomsmen and bridal party and all but a handful of the guests have all trickled toward the large white tent set up over a paved patio recessed among the trees, some two hundred meters away. She knows Eliott has been sending her messages, but she had silenced her phone as soon as the first ( _—Lucy, come over where we are, we have to talk_ ) had arrived. “ _Secondaire_?”

“Yes.” She tries not to sigh too heavily. “He looked older than his age. And I wasn’t seventeen yet.” She peers at Chloé’s face, but apart from the obstinately down-turned mouth, it is impassive. “Really, like I said, he’s like a younger brother. It’s been this way for ten years, more.” Anxiety gnaws steadily away at the crusts of her self-possession. Pausing, she fumbles in her bag for her lipstick, uncaps it, daubs a dot of its hearts-blood crimson to the center of her mouth, and presses her lips together.

“And Lu—Lucas, you know him too?”

“Well, yes, sort of.” She shoves the lipstick firmly into the depths of the bag, snaps the catch. “Basically through Eliott. Your turn, _Blanche Neige._ You also know both of them? How?” Chloé’s teeth click together and Lucille feels her lungs constrict. She has never seen such a look of fury on this soft face, not even that time, maybe two or three weeks after their first date, when Chloé had screamed curses at a catcaller in the park until the man, under the unamused eyes of the other picnickers, retreated from sight.

Fortunately or unfortunately, Chloé looks absolutely charming with her cheeks rosy and her brows pulled low and her eyes like razors. “They’re crazy. Absolutely batshit crazy.”

Lucille chews her lip but does not interrupt.

“They’re—at least, Lucas is an ass. A manchild. A walking stereotype.”

“Of what?” Sweat trickles between her shoulder blades, along with a sickly awareness. “Oh. You dated.” As though the situation could get any more ridiculous. “Didn’t you?”

“He’s the one I mentioned that first time we met up, at that place near campus. The one with the periodic table on the blackboard.”

“I remember.” She does remember. The pot lights on Chloé’s hair, which had been a little fluffed by the humidity and heat under its straw hat, cute beyond words. Her own sweating palms, sweating forehead, sweating everything. The hibiscus iced tea she had barely tasted. Texting Eliott afterward, certain that she was never going to hear from Mademoiselle Men Are Trash again. “You were really pissed off about him.”

“Well, yes, and you wouldn’t be, if you’d gotten totally fucking used as a beard? Like it’s, I don’t know, 2012 again?” Chloé’s voice wobbles, and she kicks again at the ground. “God.”

“What—well, only if you want to tell me,” Lucille, sensing an opening at last, strokes the back of Chloé’s closer hand. “But what happened?” Internally, she shouts: but what the _fuck_ does everybody see there behind those hubcap eyes?

* * *

 

“Wait, wait,” Chloé pants, pulling more firmly this time at Lucille’s elbow. “Lucy, wait.”

“No, we are going to damn well get you an apology from both of these—these—” she grinds her teeth as they enter the cool shade under the tent and two children, aged six or seven, seated with their parents at the nearest table, faces smudged with chocolate spread, look alertly up at them. “These _nincompoops_. Immediately.”

“But wait, Lucas is in the wedding party. Let’s have a drink first and wait until the cake and things are done with and not bother Daphy and Baz.” Chloé whispers, pleading. In reply to Lucille’s huff, she adds, “It’s been months, another hour won’t make a difference.”

Lucille squints at the long table arranged at the front of the tent, where Basile and Daphné are laughing like monarchs, surrounded by their respective squadrons of teal and pink. One chair between two of the women in pink is empty. Her eyes scan the rest. “Where is he, even?”

It’s been a long time since she could say, without exaggeration, that she has seen red; she’s beginning to see red now.

“Come on, please, let’s just relax a little for now.” Chloé steers her toward their Table 10, with a centerpiece of somewhat blobby pink- and teal-painted hearts, rendered in clay and apparently Daphné’s own handiwork.

She nods perfunctorily at the other members of Chloé and Daphné’s university choir, Daphné’s roommates, Daphné’s fellow volunteers at the “Melting Potes” international student club. She gulps down one glass of champagne, then another.

There is still no sign of Lucas.

As she rises for yet another toast, she surveys the other tables, sipping slowly; as she suspected, Eliott’s unruly head is also nowhere to be found, though she recognizes—and flashes a quick smile that she hopes looks genuine—at Sofiane Alaoui and Idriss Bakhellal, cheerfully bracketing what must be Eliott’s empty seat at Table 3.

Once again seated, she eases her phone out from her bag, carefully.

 

**Today, 17:02**

**Eliott**

Lucy, come over where we are, we have to talk

 

**17:04**

fuck I’m sorry

we have to talk to Chloé

and you of course

 

**17:05**

can you two come over to the red bushes

I mean the bushes with the red flowers

 

**17:07**

fine

Lucas says they’re camellias

the camellia bushes

 

**17:08**

quick the reception’s going to start soon

c’mon

Lucy

 

Nothing in the thirty minutes since.

She meets Chloé’s accusing eyes. “They’re about to bring out the cake. I want to go take some pictures. Are you coming?” With an apologetic cringe, she stuffs the phone away and follows Chloé to the low table around which an assortment of gray-haired relations and already tipsy friends are gathered. Sofiane nods at her with a sparkling grin. _Le parfait_.

For whatever reason, hearing about _him_ the first time from Eliott, three or four years ago, had caused her to seethe with a jealousy almost as strong as when she’d seen terrified little Lucas curled in on himself, on that cold Chamonix hotel bed, though of course she had every reason to envy Lucas and almost none at all to feel the same way about Sofiane.

Maybe it’s that he’s simply too perfect. She returns the nod and the smile.

There are cheers as the chicken-wielding blond, Lucas’s handsome fellow swan-tamer, and two of the pink-swathed bridesmaids—one in a pink hijab, the other a tall Nordic type with pink silk flowers behind her ears—bring in a gigantic platter on which is balanced a tower of cupcakes, frosted pink, teal, and white. She notes Sofiane beaming extra-wide at the young black woman in the hijab, who shakes her head but then allows her eyes to crinkle back at him.

Basile trots over, despite everyone’s loud protests, to assist the cake-carriers; the hijabi hands him the two cakes from the top of the arrangement, each white-frosted and adorned with a decidedly amateurish representation, in ganache, of one of the newlyweds. She grins while rolling her eyes,“At least put these somewhere safe,” she gestures at the table, from which Daphné looks on with no little anxiety, “so when one of you inevitably tip all of these others over, you won’t lose your own cakes.”

Amidst general laughter, Lucille slips her arm around Chloé’s waist and watches Basile as he obediently takes the pastries back to his seat. She studiously ignores the two or three pairs of eyes that fall on the two of them. It’s been a long time since she’s been at a social function this resoundingly heterosexual. At least the eyes are merely curious and not narrowed in suspicion.

Then she feels irritation harden her smile into a grimace. The small sweaty candy has reappeared. His shirt buttons have very obviously been done up incorrectly; his collar gapes against his throat, lopsided. He embraces Basile, who nearly drops the two white cakes. She can read his lips forming _desolé, desolé_.

Worse, the cause of his absence hovers, slouching, nearby, introducing himself to Daphné, to Black Ponytail, to a pink-clad brunette who is unmistakably winking up at him over the edge of her champagne flute. At the moment Lucille catches his eye with a hard, incredulous glare, Eliott’s shoulders shoot defensively toward his ears. But he begins to draw nearer. As one, Lucille and Chloé stride to meet him a safer distance from the table of cupcakes,

“What the _hell_ were you thinking?” She hisses once he is at arm’s length. “Honestly!”

Eliott licks his lips. His smile is small but ingratiating. “Sorry, that was stupid. But that shirt, it looks nice on him, no?”

“I don’t mean _that_ , I meant—”

“—did you two seriously go fuck in the bushes, seriously?” Chloé cuts in.

Eliott blinks down at her. “We didn’t get that far. But why didn’t you two come, anyway? Lucas is going to be doing a hundred things until later, so—” He gestures vaguely behind him to the head table, where Lucas and Blond Glasses are trying to turn on the hover mic.

Lucille pinches the bridge of her nose between two fingers. “Just tell me why you—why you _assaulted_ people in public with _paint,_ okay?”

“I told you about that already! Right when it happened, almost!”

Chloé pivots and turns the darkest of frowns onto Lucille. She sighs. “No, he did tell me, but he said he threw paint all over _Lucas_ . I had no idea _you_ were there, too, _ma petite_.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Eliott says, in a stumbling blurt. “Chloé, I am, really. That wasn’t fair to you. I—shit, I should really pay you back for that dress. It looked nice.”

Chloé inclines her head at him. Her voice is dangerously soft. “What dress?”

“The one—uh, weren’t you wearing a dress? In Tête d’Or, with, uh, with Lucas?” He looks desperately at Lucille, again tugging at his collar, though his two top buttons are already undone. “Fuck.”

“You have _no_ idea what you did, do you?” Chloé stamps her foot. The pointed heel of her shoe clacks hard on the floorboards, close enough to Eliott’s toes that he twitches. “You probably don’t even—even remember me being there at all.” She nudges away Lucille’s placating hand. “You nutjobs. I hope you’re fucking _happy_ together. Now I’m going to go sit down and toast my friend and not let you all ruin a nice evening.” She strides back toward Table 10.

“Shit,” Eliott says. He chews his lower lip. Lucille has to shut her eyes for a moment before she can speak.

“Look, she doesn’t know about you, okay? She doesn’t know. She’s just angry, she doesn’t mean anything by it.” She crosses her arms. “Lucas, get Lucas to talk to her.” Then she turns on her heel and heads for her own waiting seat.

The only conclusion: the fluff-headedness is contagious. Once contracted, there’s no hope of a cure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just one more chapter (about as long as the first) to go!  
> Thanks for reading, and thanks to [@hallo-catfish (ryuujitsu)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryuujitsu/pseuds/zetaophiuchi) for putting up with these hijinks invading their nice, aesthetically coherent world. :3


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

>  
> 
> _At that moment, with the swell of the music (Whoa-a-a, my love, my darling), the colors blink into amber; under one of the slow-spinning autolights, Lucas Lallemant is standing on his tiptoes to kiss Eliott._

Nothing else interesting occurs through dinner (the menu just as straight as the ceremony, Lucille thinks, with its assemblage of grilled vegetables, the usual cheeses, medallions of veal or pork chops, pink-and-teal _trous normands_ ), except when two employees of the animal rental agency from which had been obtained the assortment of angry birds arrive in a bright-green self-driven minivan to collect their avians. Apologies are murmured from them to the Savarys about the unexpected shortage of swans and the temporary illness of the other mandarin duck. There then ensues another swan-wrestling episode, in which Black Ponytail is nipped in a spot embarrassingly near his rump, to the guests’ merriment and the rental agency employees’ dismay. Daphné sympathetically rushes to tap her glass and declare the floor open for speechifying.

Of the bride’s family, only two cousins are present; they tell short, amusing anecdotes about Daphné’s generosity, including one in which she, at four, had tried to donate a box of ice cream sandwiches to a fundraiser for ill children. The maid of honor adjusts her hijab with exaggerated demureness, winking at Daphné, then recounts the saga of the king-sized futon that Daphné had installed in the “Melting Potes” common room and later defended, in the face of the university administration’s disapprobation, as a “true site of cultural exchange.”

Then Mme. Savary practically bounces to her feet. “As many of you may know, Baz was almost the son of Tom Cruise,” she begins; there are loud guffaws from some of the tables, mixed with cries of _Monique!_ , and slightly puzzled chuckles from the others. M. Savary rolls his eyes.

Chloé, who had been stone-faced for the last fifteen minutes, finally allows herself a perplexed little smile at this, and Lucille bumps her knee beneath the table. With a _moue_ of mock reluctance, she takes Lucille’s hand and rubs its fingertips through the charmingly brief speech. “And thank you, all of you who gave to the International Bipolar Foundation and the Fondation de France in lieu of gifts, per the couple’s request. I could not ask for a more thoughtful son than Baz, nor a more wonderful daughter-in-law than Daphy.” Monique dabs at her eyes.

“The what foundation?” Chloé whispers. “I gave to the Fondation de France. Rebuilding after that mudslide in Alsace. But what was that other one?”

The loud cheers and applause that greet the end of Mme. Savary’s speech allow Lucille to answer with only a small shrug.

* * *

 

 Standing at the fringe of the crowd surrounding the spot on the dance floor where Basile and Daphné wait, arms around each other, to begin their first dance, Lucille feels a careful tap on her shoulder. Turning, she raises both eyebrows at Lucas Lallemant, shirt buttons rectified, hair in a somewhat tidier configuration (though frankly the bar had been set very low by his initial appearance with the swan), his left hand tight-held in Eliott’s right. The curling of Chloé’s lip is almost audible. She wraps her palm placatingly around Chloé’s wrist.

“Hi,” says Lucas, a little breathlessly. When he receives no reply, he bites his lower lip; Eliott rubs a soothing thumb over his knuckles. “Chloé, can we talk? I’ll buy you a drink? And you too, Lucille.”

“I’m fine.” Chloé bites out. “And I don’t need any more apologies.” Lucas deflates a little. “You two be together and, and—whatever. I’m fine. I don’t need any more craziness. I don’t need to be treated like a fucking whim.” She squeezes Lucille’s waist a little more tightly and begins to turn back to the newlyweds.

Lucas says, frowning, “Wait, it wasn’t—what do you mean, craziness?” He eyes Lucille sidelong. “It was just bad—bad communication. I was wrong, Chloé.”

“Okay, what the hell do you want me to call it? Madness! Mania!”

A few people are staring; Lucille smiles apologetically at them, but only with her mouth. “ _Ma petite_ —”

“I wasn’t manic,” Eliott says quietly. “I was just upset, Chloé. Upset like you are now. I’m sorry.”

“And me too, just me, in fact. Shit,” Lucas tilts his head at an imploring angle. His hands are spread like those of a beseeching saint; his eyes are vast and the deep color of the freshly fallen night beyond the tent. “He really wasn’t manic. But Eliott didn’t mean to say that to you, at the park. It was me, my fault, Chloé. I was selfish. But I never meant to bring you into—into things like that.”

Chloé’s lips part. Lucille can almost see the words, hard and vicious, forming in her throat. “We’re going to get a little air, okay? Come on, come.” She shrugs at the two young men, mouthing _I didn’t tell her anything_ , but Lucas is only furrowing his eyebrows at Eliott, who is murmuring while following the women with his eyes, “She wouldn’t have.”

* * *

 

“Why? Why are you taking his side?” Chloé’s hands are fisting against the satiny weave of her skirt. “And you were about to, like, go slap them before dinner.”

Lucille slides her hands up to Chloé’s shoulders, goosebumped in the deepening chill of the evening. They had to walk a long way to be able to hear each other, because dance music now booms from under the tent.

“I’m not.” She noses at Chloé’s hair, at the pale line of scalp in her part. “It’s just, well, I think they mean it. Eliott, certainly. And Lucas, he’s very slow sometimes—”

“That’s generous.”

“All times, even. But I do think he didn’t want to hurt you.” She presses a kiss to Chloé’s nearer temple, fragrant with the gardenia-heavy perfume that Lucille will always associate with the night they first spent together, then does the same for the other. “Come on, look at yourself, _Blanche Neige_ . Probably he really thought he’d just get with you and _voilà_ , heterosexuality.”

She makes an exaggerated face of disgust, at which Chloé huffs with exasperated amusement. But she’s not angry at heterosexuality, not now. Thanks to it, all this is coming out during the spectacle of a wedding; otherwise, without happy, alcoholic, ritual distraction, the thoughts of Lucas once again in the secret places where she has been, saying the same lovers’ words that she has said, would overwhelm her.

“Hmm.” Chloé strokes the strap of Lucille’s dress where it overlays the collarbone, looking up through her lashes. “But he was two-timing me with Eliott. Some heterosexuality.”

“Oh no,” she replies before she can think to stop herself. “I think they only met again after you and Lucas started going out.” Fuck. How many glasses of champagne had it been? And why did she take that Bourdeaux with the veal?

Chloé’s budding smile withers. “Again?”

“And, I mean, why worry about them, when—”

“They knew each other before—? Before me. Fuck.” Chloé lifts her face to the full-dark sky. “And you never said— _damn_ it.”

“I had no idea it was Lucas you were with!” She manages to halt her wine-wagged tongue, this time, before she can add that Eliott had mentioned “a girl” who’d been with Lucas, but never Chloé’s name.

“But, before? When? How?” She forces herself to look Chloé full in the face; the relief at seeing not indignation but merely resignation there buoys her where she had not realized she was sinking. “I met Lucas the first day he got off the train in Lyon. Or was it?”

Briefly, she tastes the numbness and acid of bad takeout coffee from that dim little shop off the expressway in Aix-les-Bains, swallowed while too hot; she smells the mustiness of panic overlaying the whir of the Demaurys’ brand-new electric Citroën as they drove forty kilometers an hour above the speed limit, headfirst into a light flurry blowing off the mountains; she feels, under and between her fingers, the thinness of Eliott’s burning shoulders through his T-shirt as he sobbed, the dry fluff of the hood of his coat, lying on the stained floor of the hotel room like an abandoned pelt. She sees again the wide blue eyes of Lucas Lallemant, sixteen, as they drowned in tears, while he clutched _Mont Blanc: Hiking Trails and Environs_ to him like a talisman, a shield.

Every winter before that one, her parents had taken her and Martine (and later, Martine’s boyfriend and their twins, too) to the Alps. They used to joke that her Plan B, if the law thing didn’t work out, would definitely be ski-bumming around Europe.

But now it’s been nearly eleven years since she’s so much as touched a ski. She hates the sight of snow.

“It,” she has to clear her throat to continue. “It’s not for me to tell, _ma petite_. But they knew each other already.”

Chloé’s lips part; her teeth gleam a little blue, then a little pink, catching the distantly strobing lights from the tent. Lucille meets the dark eyes above them, steadily. With an almost infinitesimal sigh, Chloé presses her mouth shut. She allows her chin to be chucked, her lips to be kissed.

“How about we go dance for a little, then we go home? I’m pretty sure I promised your father to have you back by midnight?” Chloé snorts, but puts one hand through the crook of Lucille’s elbow as she, very quickly, brushes at the outside corners of her eyes with the knuckles of the other. Lucille pretends not to see.

* * *

 

They find the tent warmed by the density of swaying bodies and a long _whoa_ \- _a-a-a_ rising to the chiming beat of a high-hat. The lights are spiraling slowly overhead, dark blue with flashes of tender green. _My love, my darling_ . The colors mute the otherwise glaring pink and teal and white of the wedding party, so that it takes many seconds for Lucille to realize she’s staring at Basile, his best man, Blond Arthur of the Glasses, and Lucas’s fellow swan-tussler Yann swaying together, arm-in-arm, each in his unique state of weeping disarray. _Time goes by so slowly._ Daphné and her platoon of pink, a few meters beyond, are likewise tearily embracing.

 _Lonely rivers flow_ , and she feels Chloé’s hand on her shoulder, slipping across her nape, sending tingling threads to her breasts, her thighs, her toes. She turns, closing her arms tightly. _I’ll be coming home, wait for me._ She shuts her eyes to enjoy the smooth glide of their cheeks meeting, but Chloé starts, sucks in a breath. “What is it?” She turns to follow Chloé’s gaze.

At that moment, with the swell of the music ( _Whoa-a-a, my love, my darling_ ), the colors blink into amber; under one of the slow-spinning autolights, Lucas Lallemant is standing on his tiptoes to kiss Eliott, who pulls him so close, so suddenly, that it’s miraculous that they do not tip over onto the Savarys, who bob gently together just beside them. Eliott’s hands are joined behind Lucas’s head and Lucas gazes upward with an adoration that is like the snap of long-pent thunder, the slice of sunlight cutting away morning fog, the burst of a summer-ripe fruit on the patient tongue. They sway. And they kiss, and they kiss.

 _And time can do so much_ , the warm voice booms. _Are you still mine?_

Chloé does not try to blot away her tears unnoticed this time. She lets Lucille wipe them clean, tenderly, instead; she returns the kiss Lucille places like a soft offering at the corner of her mouth. “Okay. I think I see,” she whispers.

“Oh yes?” Lucille swallows. Her lips must be splotchy with red; she tastes the sweetness of the lipstick against her teeth. She thinks: and can you let him go? And will you be able, now, to really look at me, and believe that I am really looking at you? But she is again, miraculously, able to stop the words’ tumbling out.

“Yes.” Chloé rings her arms around Lucille’s shoulders and brings them nose-to-nose, her long dark lashes soft on Lucille’s cheek, as the strings crescendo under _your love to me-e-e-e-e._

“Me-e-e-e-e,” Lucille says, low, in Chloé’s ear, while the final chord strikes, and is rewarded with a laugh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, and for your comments and kudoses. Please check out [@ryuujitsu/hallo-catfish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryuujitsu/pseuds/zetaophiuchi) and my other SKAMFr and SKAMFr RPF works if you haven't already. Bisous.


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